Toby Upson is in Paris and playing to the stereotype - wandering the magical streets, wafting, like a flâneur caught in the high spring breeze, and surveying the art.
Having spent my morning walking the banks of the Seine, I entered the Musée d'Orsay for a spritz of capital ‘A’ museum Art. I leave with fond memories that make me feel ooh so Parisian as I peel layers off a buttery croissant. The addition of my Édouard Manet, Flowers dans un vase de cristal, postcard on the rickety wire table just adds to my romantic collage.
Perhaps it is because of the beautiful sunny day, but as I walk past the Louvre my admiration for post-(and)Impressionist flower paintings grows - grows, and blooms. Much like the breeze emanating off the Seine’s waves, there is something in the thickly forms of Van Goth, Derain, Cézanne, or my fav’ Manet, that crashes out of their canvases emanating an attractive air of sprightly coolness. On an iconographic level, these bouquet paintings offer so much more than darling awe; each flower pertains to complex histories of migration, colonisation, commodification, as well as to spiritual and social connotations. These pretty images could be seen, or read, therefore as a documentary record of the beau-face of Modernity, and at the same time its asymmetric fallout: Coloniality, to follow Walter Mignolo.
Continuing with my springful divergences, I arrive in the 4th Arrondissement and enter Galerie Chantal Crousel. I am welcomed by Graft (2021), thousands upon thousands of recycled polyvinyl petals pooled in windswept constellations on the gallery’s floor. Bonjour. Given my mornings wandering thoughts, and my associative personality, it is perhaps of no surprise that I felt an immediate pull to this seemingly tranquil exhibition.
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| Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Martin Argyroglo. |
Titled Antille, a reference to both the period before European colonisation of the Americas as well as the semi-mythical unknown land labelled on mediaeval maps as Antilia, the exhibition brings together three bodies of work by the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla (two of which I mention here). With a practice rooted in research, the pair clash materials and connotations to illuminate occluded geopolitical narratives. In Antille, the use of hand-painted plastic, video, and sound create an atmosphere that is at once cool, and then cutting; calling out the continued ecological effect of colonisation on the fauna of the Caribbean, and, to me, how this destruction is glossed over through petty associations.
As with the speculative histories that can emerge once we look beneath the plasticy paintings of Manet et al. the sea of recycled petals that constitute Graft reference both the idle of summer vacations on ‘island paradises’ (think necks with garlands) as well as the direct ecological effect of this idle-vacating on the natural environment. Unlike the bold colours of those attractive Museum paintings - indeed of flashy holiday adverts - Allora & Calzadilla’s stilled-life uses muted tones of pink through brown to create its allure. This variation in hue shows seven stages in the biological breakdown of the flowers strewn on the floor. To me this staging of decay, enunciated in the kitchy camp language of mass consumption, can be read as a mirror to the false realities pictured and peddled by shiny Modernity; that is, an ideology that foregrounds its quest for a quick picturesque dream whilst turning a blind eye too, or just blatantly ignoring (denying) any long-term material ramifications of its trespasses.
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| Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view (detail of Graft, 2021), courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Martin Argyroglo. |
Amongst this sea of blossom, the natural liveness of the world is introduced into the exhibition’s space through video and sonic media. Penumbra (2020), is a minimal soundscape and a grainy series of video projections that trace the arc of the sun’s movements around the concealed gallery space. Echoing the vacated effect of colonial exploration/exploitation, David Lang’s audio sounds far from something fresh-air spritely. To link my metaphors, this quiet tweeting sounds more like an exhausted canary, than a perky parakeet.
Riffing off of the associative is a way for Allora & Calzadilla to delight and illuminate through interaction - to paraphrase Michelle White in Antille's press release. The video footage of Penumbra furthers this intuitive thinking for aesthetic - dare I say, subtly-sublime - effect. The ghostly film appears not to be black and white but rather bleached of most of its saturation. Projected in soft focus, the twinkling shards of light and shadow brings to mind moments of awakening; those dewy-eyed seconds when one’s eyes adjust to the realities of the world after coming too from a deep sleep. To me, the footage recalls glimmers of the sun reflected off an expanse of water - memories of my romantic morning walk along the Seine come to my mind. In reality, the rippling shadows come from rays of sunshine dancing through Martinican foliage. If we are indeed waking from a Modern slumber, it seems the video asks us to see beyond that fantasy we have constructed for ourselves.
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| Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view (detail of Penumbra, 2020), courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Andrew Wake. |
This projection of the sun’s movements across the floors of the Absalon Valley of Martinique onto the walls of a Parisian gallery is a stunning metaphorical cut with Modernity. If those post-(and)Impressionist flower paintings, hanging on the walls in the city’s collections, can now be read in hindsight as a map for so much more writhing beneath the sheen of Modernity - that is Coloniality - this staging of life captured envelops us in the flows of colonial degradation. Moreover, it directly challenges me on my romantic associations; calling me out on what first comes to mind; forcing me to work to see beyond a notion of reality that is fixed and wholly known.
Graft and Penumbra, demonstrate Allora & Calzadilla's abilities to transform the known into something a little more hesitant; a way of thinking foregrounded by poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant. Indeed, if we think with Glissant and treat these two works as islands in an archipelago, their presentation here not only critically challenges modes of picturing life but provides a cool moment through which to begin to think of reality as a complex formed through numerable intersections; be these histories of migration, colonisation, commodification, the spiritual, the social and/or the geopolitical. After all, we must remember, that life is not idle, no romantic collage, nor postcard. Life is a living process of growing, growing, and blooming associations.
Toby Upson
Allora & Calzadilla, Antille
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Until 28 May 2022
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